Ben Fisher obituary

Ben Fisher helped develop the first digital language laboratory and multimedia centre, at Bangor University

My colleague and friend, Ben Fisher, who has died unexpectedly aged 45, was an inspiring teacher of French at Bangor University and the creator of one of the most visited railway websites in the world, the Welsh Highland Railway Project.

The son of Roy Fisher, the poet and musician, and the former Barbara Venables, Ben grew up on the university campus at Keele, where Roy was senior lecturer in American studies. After reading modern and medieval languages at Selwyn College, Cambridge, Ben moved to Bangor to do a PhD and stayed there for the rest of his life, becoming head of the French department. He happily admitted that the move had been influenced by the number of preserved narrow-gauge steam railways nearby.

Teaching for Ben did not consist of chalking up first-class degrees; the number of tributes from students who would not have finished degrees without his going the extra mile for them said far more. Rather reserved away from work, he was an idiosyncratic and funny teacher. His lateral thinking with technology made an immeasurable contribution at Bangor, notably as co-developer (with Adrian Ritchie) of the UK's first digital language laboratory, and director of the Multimedia Language Centre, which grew out of it. In the early 1990s he supervised the Estel project, which brought multilingual satellite TV into classrooms all over Wales.

Ben's doctoral thesis, on the complex, often irreverent, French avant-garde writer Alfred Jarry, was published by Liverpool University Press as The Pataphysician's Library (2000) and received a string of complimentary reviews. A series of articles in major journals on avant-garde authors followed. At the time of his death, he was starting a new project – a French Symbolist Reader.

Ben's other publishing project, http://whr.bangor.ac.uk, has been a work-in-progress for 10 years: the official website chronicling the rebuilding of the Welsh Highland Railway, the 26-mile narrow-gauge line connecting Caernarfon and Porthmadog. As Ben did not live to see the line's reopening, set for next year, his ashes will travel on the first train.